23.10.10

sunday's notes




"We will have memories of things we never did with brands we never did. Our past actions are the best predictor of our future decisions, so now all of a sudden, our future decisions are in the hands of people who want to make money off of us. That makes me very, very scared. I can see this happening and I can see it happening very soon."//Aza Raskin



"I would say the brain, but the heart is also related because the complex concept of love is formed by both bottom-up and top-down processes from the brain to the heart and vice versa. For instance, activation in some parts of the brain can generate stimulations to the heart, butterflies in the stomach. Some symptoms we sometimes feel as a manifestation of the heart may sometimes be coming from the brain."//Stephanie Ortigue



"It argues that the purpose of the universe is the evolution of ever higher forms of intelligence. At the moment we happen to be carriers. As perhaps the most highly developed intelligence in the universe, we've now succeeded in creating our truly worthy successors: computers. We have the tools of destruction in our hands, but we've sent computers into timeless, endless space, and thus, having fulfilled our destiny, we have no reason to grieve over the probable death of our species."//Joseph Weizenbaum




"The goal is to enable robots to autonomously manipulate their environment. ..Robots will have to navigate around human spaces and deal with human tools, and that’s what this program is about. ...We need robots to go do jobs that we don’t want to send humans to do because they’re too dangerous, too dirty, too dull...But I have told the teams that I strongly encourage them to collaborate with each other and the outside world. What I told them is that they should be competitive but don’t destroy each other in the beginning. Try to collaborate as everyone gets started, then you compete....The commercial applications will be all over the place. Robots will be everywhere. "//Robert Mandelbaum




"The future is the realm of the unknown. We can do much better to understand, anticipate, and prepare for the possible futures that lie ahead, but a large element of the unknown will remain. If we are to continue improving the human condition—and possible even move beyond it—we must remain open to the unknown. "//Max Moore

26.08.10

everyone's mind is different

"The manifestations of melancholic depression and, conversely, euphoric mania are also uncannily typical of social animals occupying omega and alpha status-roles. Evolutionary psychology suggests that depression is part of a genetically adaptive coping process. Depressive behaviour involves the passive submission to a prolonged or uncontrollable stress. The persistence into the post-hunter-gatherer era of depressive states continues to foster (relatively) stable hierarchies of social dominance of our hominid ancestors. "//paradise engineering






"Modern science has developed effective means that could solve most of the urgent problems in today's world – combat the majority of diseases, eliminate hunger and poverty, reduce the amount of industrial waste, and replace destructive fossil fuels by renewable sources of clean energy. The problems that stand in the way are not of an economical or technological nature; their deepest sources lie inside the human personality."// Stanislav Grof

"Dreams are a reservoir of knowledge and experience, yet they are often overlooked as a vehicle for exploring reality. In the dream state our bodies are at rest, yet we see and hear, move about, and are even able to learn. When we make good use of the dream state, it is almost as if our lives were doubled: instead of a hundred years, we live two hundred."//// Tarthang Tulku



"We think we make the future. But it is equally true that the future makes us, to the degree that our thoughts of the future constitute our minds in this moment, and these minds constrain our experience both present and forthcoming."//// Michael Garfield

"Banish the word 'struggle' from your attitude and your vocabulary. All that we do now must be done in a sacred manner and in celebration. We are the ones we have been waiting for." Hopi elders//evolver



"Perhaps the emergence of network or integral consciousness, which seems to be where the evolutionary arrow of psyche is pointing, for better or worse, demands another re-organization of the voices in our heads. Maybe all those Bluetooth headsets are just the beginning, the speaking idols of the noosphere. "////Erik Davis