“The next programming paradigm is life science. We’re going to create a living world, this century.” Andrew Hessel Finally, someone else articulating this truth with the scientific authority that might be better heard and received.
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“Not Survival of the Fittest, but Construction of the Intended”
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/metavalent/~3/NVFcJtsmrnU/1553
- Tags:
- metavalent
- biohacking
- cyborg
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How to Build a DNA Brain
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/metavalent/~3/pqlQfCim-QY/1523
Your homework for the leisurely holiday weekend is at Caltech DNA and Natural Algorithms Group.
"The answer is yes, and all it takes is a few small DNA molecules."
- Tags:
- metavalent
- neuro-cogno
- biohacking
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The Growing Eyeborg Population
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/metavalent/~3/63wEsP_nns0/1509
As we’ve long tracked, the eyeborgs continue to grow in numbers amongst us …
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Telescopic eye implant approved by the FDA
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/metavalent/~3/97B80wJFumI/1429
Not new, but worth reminding.
- Tags:
- metavalent
- biohacking
- cyborg
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Is Mech Already Better Than Meat?
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/metavalent/~3/wUstqT6H7ek/
With a new pair of meat hands “One year after double hand transplant, progress elusive” we learn that it takes three to four years of intensive therapy to bring replacement meat hands online, because the nerves have a long way to grow. In contrast, with a new mech arm, back in 2003 we, “graft existing nerve endings from his shoulder onto the pectoral muscle on his chest. Those nerves grew into the muscle after about six months. Electrodes on the graft can now pick up any thought-generated nerve impulses to the now-absent limb and transmit those to the mechanical prosthesis, controlling the movements of the arm. And in 2008, of her new mech arm and hand, Claudia Mitchell says, “it feels more real than I ever expected.”
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Big Think Month of Thinking Dangerously: Drug Our Drinking Water
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/metavalent/~3/cqYcR_7H-7Y/
Big Think asks: Why should we drug our drinking water? Jacob Appel: I think when you ask questions about whether or not any pharmaceutical or any products be added to the drinking water, you’re really asking two sets of questions. One is: should any product that might be beneficial be added to the drinking water? And secondly, should the specific product be added. The first question I think can be dismissed fairly easily. People who oppose adding enhancement to the drinking water in the way people opposed adding fluoride to the drinking water half a century ago rely on the false premise of naturalism—that because something occurs naturally it must be better.
Now many things that occur naturally are better, but that correlational, not causational. Pain is natural, anesthetics are synthetic. Most people would prefer anesthesia to pain. By the same logic, there are many things that naturally occur in the drinking water that are beneficial in some parts of the country that don’t cover other parts of the country. One of those items happens to be lithium. People who oppose adding lithium to the drinking water in trace amounts don’t go around advocating to strain the lithium from the drinking water in the areas where it does exist.
The specifics of lithium are rather interesting and I should add, I am not the first person to propose this idea. Peter Kramer floated this idea in the New York Times over a year ago, the Brown University psychiatrist, the author of “Listening to Prozac.” In areas where lithium in trace amounts is in the drinking water, there seems to be a lower level of suicidality and in the Texas counties that we’re studying, there’s actually a lower crime rate. The same studies were repeated in Japan, a completely different cultural milieu and they had the same result.
I should add that we are not talking about adding therapeutic levels of lithium to the drinking water. It’s worth noting that if you wanted to get a therapeutic level than the trace amounts that currently exist in the area where there is already lithium, you would have to drink several Olympic size swimming pools every minute to reach that level of concern. That level of therapeutics. So the reality is, these are very low levels and there’s no reason to think they are not safe in the areas they already exist, so why not give everybody that benefit? Read the full response and watch the video at Big Think.
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The Fate of the Meat World
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/metavalent/~3/czvoFY3P8FM/
The fate of the meat world View more presentations from Humanity+.
“Homo sapiens, the first truly free species, is about to decommission natural selection, the force that made us. Soon we must look deep within ourselves and decide what we wish to become.” — Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998)Wirehead Hedonism | Reproductive Revolution | Abolitionist.com | Superhappiness.com | BLTC
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What a Bird Brain: Or, Why Neurons Are Amazing
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/metavalent/~3/_lnJ6m-3i4A/
This morning I watched a bird — I believe a finch — in the back yard. He was making use of the bird house, which is quite small, featuring perhaps a 3/4″ hole for a front door.
This bird arrived on the perch with about a 4 inch long stick in it’s beak. Obviously, getting that in the front door didn’t go too well. Many birds are known tool users and problem solvers, and this very tiny clump of neurons knew enough to execute an Olympic, 2-inch horizontal perch hop with 1/2 twist, rotating 180 degrees and craning a tiny neck by sufficient additional measure to insert the long end of that stick into the house, then squeeze past and move inside to drag the stick inside.
Now, to my mind, that’s one hell of a computation problem to solve, so I took a minute to check out how the hell birds do that. Wikipedia is usually a good starting place: It seems that birds use a different part of their brain, the medio-rostral neostriatum/hyperstriatum ventrale (see also nidopallium), as the seat of their intelligence, and the brain-to-body size ratio of psittacines and corvines is actually comparable to that of higher primates. Interesting. So, just because the neocortex is the location of our highest human brain functions, that doesn’t necessarily place any restrictions upon neuronal capabilities in other regions or configurations, in general. This seems like an interesting avenue of inquiry for machine intelligence, because compared to what little computers can do today in terms of visual context construction, it would be quite a compliment to call any computer a total “bird brain.” Maybe when it comes to machine intelligence, or even modeling substrate independence for any kind of intelligence, we should consider learning to fly, before we walk.
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Engineering Tissues, Growing Organs
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/metavalent/~3/t3rBvztl5dA/
- Tags:
- metavalent
- biohacking
- war on aging
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Secret Math of Fly Eyes + AR Contact Lens
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/metavalent/~3/MZG1OhFfJmc/
Wired: The researchers’ algorithm is composed of a series of five equations through which data from cameras can be run. Each equation represents tricks used by fly circuits to handle changing levels of brightness, contrast and motion, and their parameters constantly shift in response to input. Unlike Lucas-Kanade, the algorithm doesn’t return a frame-by-frame comparison of every last pixel, but emphasizes large-scale patterns of change. In this sense, it works a bit like video-compression systems that ignore like-colored, unshifting areas. Embedded in Contact Lenses with Built-In Virtual Graphics might minimize power requirements: One obvious problem is powering such a device. The circuitry requires 330 microwatts but doesn’t need a battery. Instead, a loop antenna picks up power beamed from a nearby radio source. The team has tested the lens by fitting it to a rabbit. One of the limitations of current head-up displays is their limited field of view. A contact lens display can have a much wider field of view. “Our hope is to create images that effectively float in front of the user perhaps 50 cm to 1 m away,” says Parviz.
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Cognitive Liberty and Right to One’s Own Mind
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/metavalent/~3/BiriVNcdlhE/
More extraordinarily high-signal outputs from the seemingly inexhaustible cognition engine behind Sentient Developments: Cognitive liberty is not just about the right to modify one’s mind, emotional balance and psychological framework (for example, through anti-depressants, cognitive enhancers, psychotropic substances, etc.), it’s also very much about the right to not have one’s mind altered against their will … Our society has a rather poor track record when it comes to respecting the validity of certain mind-types … Forced cognitive modification is an issue that’s affecting real people today.
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Of Neuro Economics and Artificial Brains
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Real Discrimination Against Digital People
And many other leading edge topics in this Summer Edition of H+ Magazine, now on news stands like this one everywhere. I must have lost half of my potential contracts because the company wouldn’t deal with an anonymous avatar.
It was around 1999, about four of five years before I finally started this blog, and many of the topics covered herein were considered so fringe as to threaten my real employment, social credibility, and even mental health assessment. I had been discriminatorily profiled in the past as manifesting mental illness in the form of various overachieving cognition crimes, such as being comparatively well informed about relatively fringe science and technology progress, understanding which technologies are likely coming next, and for concisely (and in retrospect, fairly accurately) forecasting a number of likely uses and implications for those emerging capabilities. However, I do not consider myself a “futurist” in the science fiction sense; I tend rather to gravitate toward the interface between the potential and the actual; I naturally find myself studying, advocating for, participating in, or at the very least desiring to act as a catalyzing agent that helps in some small way to transmute the potential into the next new actual. In some of those earlier cases, I’d helped to found companies that went on to build some everyday technologies that we now take for granted. At one point, I was literally told by investors and other well respected authoritative normals that I was not mentally well for pronouncing intentions that I went on to fulfill in every way. That particular technology’s trajectory is well documented and part of it even went on to include new IEEE standards. What I learned from such experiences is that it is empirically dangerous to share some of my understandings and insights with humans that populate the center of the bell curve. That’s a lot of humans, friend. Some of them, in fact many of them, would have locked me up and medicated me rather permit me to go on and build technologies that you yourself are very likely using today, if you use the internet every single day. So, I was forced to realize how the normals treat people who see things a little “too differently” from them; and from my perspective, such people became a very clear and present danger. I realized that I had to find ways to protect myself. Unsurprisingly, again in retrospect, that protection came in the form of surrounding myself with similar beings to the greatest degree possible; first by modem, then by academic association and increasing education, then by physical relocation to a part of the country where cognitive diversity was held a little less suspect. In some cases, even that didn’t feel like enough. When I began understanding that brain computer interfaces and other posthuman eventualities were not just possible, but both inevitable and desirable, I was utterly closed-lipped about it in public. I knew that if I began talking about these things as if they were obvious, the normals would bound me, medicate me, and I would never be heard from again. Yet, I simply had to have an outlet for these ideas and other emerging trends that I perceived as directly or tangentially interdependent in the construction of our posthuman future. At that time, I hadn’t yet heard of the word posthuman; but I fully understood and expected positive permutations of posthumanity to emerge within the subsequent 20, 50, and 100 years. We’re now 10 years into that first 20 year time frame. I also wanted to publish and broadcast such “fringe” thoughts in a way that might help others who viewed the world similarly to the way I perceived it, to feel emboldened, allied, encouraged, and motivated. Thus emerged the precursor to this site, A Webcam Darkly and later, as I began understanding this little experiment in accountable anonymity and technoprogressive futurtechture: Metavalent Stigmergy. While the past decade has seen some gains in cognitive tolerance, we have a long, long way to go toward building a world that is safe and supportive of both physical and mental morphological diversity. In today’s world, it’s fine if you have the cash and established social standing of a Ray Kurzweil or James Hughes to defend yourself; but there are thousands of us who share lesser or less developed and varied permutations of such forward-leaning cognitive styles, who do not yet possess such robust defense systems or even sufficiently fully architected personnas. Consequently, we are numbered among those who are expected to keep working at 7-11 or Kmart, or maybe manage a few other writers, or herd cats for some pointy-haired boss’s project or program; even as we see the world accelerating all around us in ways that create a more than full time autodidact vocation of simply keeping up, in hopes of preparing for, and adapting to whatever comes next. We live in a world where the normals won’t let us have money or eat or have a house if we don’t spend the majority of our already far-too-brief lives engaged in these relatively meaningless and mundane tasks that society understands as perpetuating its own safe status quo; yet, the overwhelming time and attention demands of that perceived safety effectively shackles our own intellectual, id est, existential puissance. So this issue of H+ Magazine coincides with a bit of a personal watershed. The topics being discussed are now sufficiently well understood and have been experienced by a large enough constituency, that it is tempting to call the all clear and to feel safe coming out from both the real and perceived social safety of this dual purpose identity bunker and experiment in accountable anonymity. I’ve experimented over the past five years or so in creating an identity that is both relatively anonymous and yet fully accountable to the community in every way. I say relatively because it’s also relatively easy to put together the pieces and find my biological identity if you care; I just don’t flat out give people the easy answer, outside of a very close circle of friends. Second Life has helped tremendously to advance the cause of accountable anonymity, but the ultimate achievement would be to coexist in a world where we are all safe amongst the normals; where cognitive diversity is not just tolerated, but celebrated. Now I’m really dreaming, huh? Toward that apparitional aspiration, perhaps we could create a magazine and sell the normals harmless pills with polysyllabic names that persuade them to believe that they too are exceptional, or at least that they too might have the potential to become exceptional. Or perhaps we could create television programs like The 4400 or Heroes that help to portray those deviant technoprogressive thinkers and positivistic posthuman dreamers as potential super allies. Nah, that’d never work. Humans aren’t that gullible. Right.
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