Loading ...Anonymous relaunches fight against Scientology
The Anonymous group is calling for disillusioned former members to return to the fold ahead of a new phase in its battle against the Church of Scientology.
A video posted on YouTube on Friday said it was time for the original founders of the protest movement to return in time for a “shift to more subtle and shocking tactics”.
Anonymous has staged demonstrations against Scientology around the world over the last six months as part of Project Chanology. Members of the loosely-knit group have demonstrated outside Scientology offices worldwide, often wearing V for Vendetta-style Guy Fawkes masks and other disguises to safeguard their identities.
Other tactics have also included running denial of service attacks on Church of Scientology websites or making prank calls to Scientology offices.
The loose-knit group is protesting against the church’s alleged financial exploitation of members as well as its hostility towards critics. The protests sprang up in response to attempts by the Church of Scientology to force websites to pull a video clip of Tom Cruise expounding some of the more colourful tenets of his beliefs. Anger at this move expressed on the 4chan discussion board and elsewhere provided the initial impetus behind Anonymous but has led to problems, according to the video.
“Those who answered the call outnumber the number from the motherland… This has resulted in Project Chanology becoming polluted by people who are judgemental of our ideology and serve the interests of special interest groups. The time for making allies at the expanse of our ideals is over,” the video states.
The time for the movement’s original creators to “return and reclaim” it has come, the video states. This will mark a “shift to more subtle and shocking tactics” as part of phase three of the operation. What these tactics are remains to be seen but the video warns the leaders of Scientology that their “card is marked” and promises new (unspecified) initiatives, starting on 8 August.”
Article: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/04/anonymous_versus_scientology/
World first biological brain robot
“Meet Gordon, probably the world’s first robot controlled exclusively by living brain tissue.Stitched together from cultured rat neurons, Gordon’s primitive grey matter was designed at the University of Reading by scientists who unveiled the neuron-powered machine on Wednesday.
Their groundbreaking experiments explore the vanishing boundary between natural and artificial intelligence, and could shed light on the fundamental building blocks of memory and learning, one of the lead researchers told AFP.
“The purpose is to figure out how memories are actually stored in a biological brain,” said Kevin Warwick, a professor at the University of Reading and one of the robot’s principle architects.
Observing how the nerve cells cohere into a network as they fire off electrical impulses, he said, may also help scientists combat neurodegenerative diseases that attack the brain such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
“If we can understand some of the basics of what is going on in our little model brain, it could have enormous medical spinoffs,” he said.
Looking a bit like the garbage-compacting hero of the blockbuster animation “Wall-E”, Gordon has a brain composed of 50,000 to 100,000 active neurons.
Once removed from rat foetuses and disentangled from each other with an enzyme bath, the specialised nerve cells are laid out in a nutrient-rich medium across an eight-by-eight centimetre (five-by-five inch) array of 60 electrodes.
This “multi-electrode array” (MEA) serves as the interface between living tissue and machine, with the brain sending electrical impulses to drive the wheels of the robots, and receiving impulses delivered by sensors reacting to the environment.
Because the brain is living tissue, it must be housed in a special temperature-controlled unit — it communicates with its “body” via a Bluetooth radio link.
The robot has no additional control from a human or computer.
From the very start, the neurons get busy. “Within about 24 hours, they start sending out feelers to each other and making connections,” said Warwick.
“Within a week we get some spontaneous firings and brain-like activity” similar to what happens in a normal rat — or human — brain, he added.
But without external stimulation, the brain will wither and die within a couple of months.
“Now we are looking at how best to teach it to behave in certain ways,” explained Warwick.”
Very cool.
Article: http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=080813192458.ud84hj9h&show_article=1
San Jose Professor Fired for Answering Question about Genetics and Homosexuality
A former San Jose City College biology professor is suing the college after she was fired for answering a student’s question on the relationship between homosexuality and heredity.
On June 21, 2007, June Sheldon, an adjunct professor teaching a human heredity course, answered a question about how heredity affects homosexual behavior by citing the class textbook and a well-known German scientist. She noted that the scientist found a correlation between maternal stress and homosexual behavior in males but that the scientist’s views are only one set of theories in the nature-versus-nurture debate mentioned by the textbook. Sheldon then explained that the class would learn in a later chapter of the textbook that homosexual behavior may be influenced by both genes and the environment.
The school launched an investigation after a different student in the class lodged an informal complaint that deemed Sheldon’s comments “offensive and unscientific.” Sheldon was later recommended for removal from the adjunct seniority rehire preference list and terminated by the district’s board of trustees on Feb. 13, 2008.
The Alliance Defense Fund, a public-interest law firm, has filed the lawsuit on Sheldon’s behalf.
“Teachers shouldn’t be punished for doing their job as educators. They know that students can’t be expected to make good, well-informed decisions if they’re only hearing part of the story,” said ADF Litigation Staff Counsel David Hacker. “College officials have stripped a professor of the right to discuss competing theories and ideas in the classroom, something which represents the foundation of higher education.”
“Firing a teacher for responding to a student’s question with the truth is ridiculous,” said Hacker. “The textbook itself points out that the causes of homosexual behavior are a subject of debate in the scientific community. This teacher did nothing more than explain this fact. She is a dedicated and highly qualified professional who has been horribly wronged.”
Laura Schulkind, the college’s lawyer, told The Mercury News that she had not yet seen the lawsuit, but added, “I am aware of [Sheldon's] allegations. I believe them to be factually and legally incorrect in every respect.”
Un-fucking believable. What century is this again?
What duplicating or backing up your mind really means: Mind snapshots
Shortly after writing the The challenge of mind duplication/transfer post I went seeking others to chat with about this topic. I hoped on irc and had an interesting conversation in a neuroscience channel. It was a great conversation that lead to some very interesting possibilities being discussed.
People typically think that duplicating the mind means that they can live forever or continue their existence indefinitely. The reality is that *if* in the future we can duplicate the mind we’ll be creating snapshots of the mind when the copy was made. We’ll likely not be able to take snapshots from people immediately before they die and instead may have snapshots from various phases in their life. You may decide to ‘backup’ at important moments in your life at various ages.
The use cases are fairly interesting for when you’d use this.
- Reverting to a saved mind snapshot when you’ve experienced a trauma
- Editing a snapshot to remove memories
- Restoration for medical purposes such as:
* Restoring backups to multiple bodies to study environmental effects on mind development
* Restoring backups to multiple bodies to study physical affects on the active state of the mind
- Restoring your pets mind into a cloned copy
- Restoring a human mind to a cloned copy to gain from their perspectives
- Restoring a mind to a cloned copy to utilizing their knowledge and thought patters to solve complex problems
- Restoring an ‘aged mind’ into a younger cloned instance of the body
The possibilities are endless and certainly make for a decent scifi book 
New map IDs the core of the human brain
“An international team of researchers has created the first complete high-resolution map of how millions of neural fibers in the human cerebral cortex — the outer layer of the brain responsible for higher level thinking — connect and communicate. Their groundbreaking work identified a single network core, or hub, that may be key to the workings of both hemispheres of the brain.”
Very cool!
Modeling Conciousness: what do we do with AI?
We’ve heard that AI will be the future and change our lives. We’ve seen movies where robots have human personalities and can interact with us as interact with each other. In order to achieve these “AI use cases” you must first understand what it means to be human and more specifically what mimicking our behavior means.
- Communication: Humans have extensive ways to communicate (verbal, written language, physical expressions)
- Emotions: Humans like other animals have some emotions (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotion) (fear, anger, love, rage)
- Feelings: Humans have Feeling (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feeling)
- Mental State: Human minds have various states (certainty, confusion)
- Beliefs and Principles: Humans typically have some baseline beliefs and principles (don’t kill, etc..)
- Social Intelligence: Humans have social intelligence
- Perception/Awareness: Humans have awareness to their own existence
- Creative Abilities: (Ability to improvise)
- Motives
Understanding these components can help us better focus particular traits for specific tasks.
Therapy: Some people have a difficult time interacting with others due to specific disorders or trauma’s they’ve experienced. In the future AI ( in robots) likely will become a part of our lives. We already have robots in our homes, like the Roomba Vacuum cleaner which we’ve accepted as normal. We know that certain personality types clash with each other and certain mental disorders amplify these frictions to the point where one personality types may avoid another. Picture robots that can communicate with us and for the purpose of therapy mimic certain human personality types. Say you’re a right winged republican and have anger issues with left leaning hippies, communicating with a artificial ‘hippie’ personality can allow you to explore frustrations and reactions to those frustrations with no accountability or consequences.
Policy Making: Policies are sets of rules defined for a particular topic. Policies when created are influenced by the perceptions, experiences, and motives. Creating software that can be provided with data and create policies for a given topic without bias or personal motives likely will be something we’ll consider normal. Anyone know of any research here?
You get the idea. One thing I haven’t been able to find is a model of the human mind/classification of the traits that make up consciousness. Does such a thing exist?
Media questions Obama’s morality for smoking, imaginary man still ok
Obama was slammed today by the media for smoking.
http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalradar/2008/06/obama-admits-sm.html
Why does the media spend so much time slamming people on nonsense? Its times like these I miss the 1980’s when I don’t remember seeing this sort of crap in the news. What I found most amusing is that the media will slam a person for a physical addiction, but not his mental status (believing in heaven and god).
Existentialism
From wikipedia
“Existentialism is a philosophical movement which posits that individuals create the meaning and essence of their lives, as opposed to deities or authorities creating it for them.
Existentialism generally postulates that the absence of a transcendent force (God) means that the individual is entirely free, and, therefore, ultimately responsible. It is up to humans to create an ethos of personal responsibility for themselves, outside of any branded belief system. ”
“Existentialism tends to focus on the question of human existence — the feeling that there is no purpose, indeed nothing, at the core of existence. Finding a way to counter this nothingness, by embracing existence, is the fundamental theme of existentialism, and the root of the philosophy’s name.”
Belief in God ‘childish’, a ‘human weaknesses’ - Albert Einstein
A letter was just sold written by Albert Einstein stating that religion was childish
“The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish.” “No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this,”
For your militant theists reading this post thinking these are words of hate please take into consideration the author.
The challenge of mind duplication/transfer
Others have discussed the concept of duplicating one’s mind or backing it up. Before copying a mind you first need to know
1. How (minor detail!)
- While alive
- After death
2. How for that organism
- Human
- Fish
3. The context of what is being duplicated
- For the same organism
- Another organism of the same species
- A different organism
4. The ability to reinsert that context into
- The same organism
- Another similar organism
- A different organism
5. Doing it while the organism is still alive and doing it without causing any damage.
That being said conceptually we should be able to create a snapshot of a simple mind such as a worm’s, or simple organism post death. More complicated organisms such as humans are going to be an enormous challenge. For starters we’ll likely discover that the human mind while complicated isn’t going to be the most complicated mind to read or copy.
Diseases, physical changes/mutations, and disorders will make interpretation and transferring of this data difficult. Those fearing mind duplication may perhaps even damage themselves using one of these physical changes in a similar manner to how some people damage their fingerprints to prevent fingerprint identification but to prevent mind viewing. To take this one step further analysis of a mind affected by an unknown condition may be partially possible via modules for known conditions (Alzheimer’s, etc).
Even if such a technology were restricted to post death this would be extremely useful to troubleshoot cause of death, family secrets/history, as well as build a private profile on the individual. These mind images could be archived in a ‘mind library’ and could even recreate specific scene’s throughout history by those who witnessed it bringing history to a new level. Who knows maybe we’ll even see something like The Final Cut based on stored memories.
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