I met Adrian Bejan at the Lions Cannes Festival in June, where I was also introduced to his Constructal law. Here's a very nicely done video of Adrian explaining his theory. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgEBTPee9ZM&w=560&h=315] Here's the law in Bejan's terms: "For a finite-size system to persist in time (to live),...
Category: Noetics
Talking about robots, androids and the future of humans
https://soundcloud.com/siriusxmentertainment/tmeai
The big bang of the human mind, and our desire to build artificial beings
[slideshare id=46037137&doc=thebirthofart-150319085231-conversion-gate01] The "big bang of the human mind" took place around 40,000 years ago, when our prehistoric ancestors developed general purpose language. The reasons why this happened are yet unclear, and probably involve a number of genetic mutations. We know that something changed because of the emergence of art,...
Brains wired for “seeing” the invisible
Can you really be an atheist? This question is not often asked, perhaps because one implicitly assumes that not believing in god, or soul, or the afterlife, are philosophical positions, or personal choices, or indeed the result of rational analysis. After all famous atheists, like biologist Richard Dawkins or philosopher...
Welcome the mechasexual
Would you make love to a machine? Although this question may strike one as ludicrous, science’s answer is that it all depends how the machine looks like; as well as whether you are a man or a woman. As evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker tells us in his book “How the...
Gerald Edelman and AI
Gerald Edelman passed away on May 17, 2014 in La Jolla, California. In 1972 he won the Nobel Prize (together with Rodney Porter) for solving the antibody structure, and explaining how the immune system functions. His research into antibodies led him to realize the enormous explanatory potential of selective-recognition systems....
Hybrid thinking: an idea from Ray Kurzweil
[ted id=2015] In his March 20, 2014 TED talk Ray Kurzweil suggested that in a couple of decades from now we will be able to increase our neocortex's power many-fold at an instant by accessing the processing power of the cloud. He suggested that this will be possible thanks to...
Consciousness explained
Daniel Dennett is a philosopher with a mission to infuse some empirical sense to the problem of consciousness. I met him personally in Tucson Arizona in April 2006, when I interviewed him for the popular science magazine Focus, that I used to edit then. A burly and affable man who...
Interview with Christof Koch
(Christof Koch is one of the most eminent researchers in consciousness studies and a collaborator of the late Nobel laureate Francis Crick. This is an edited transcript of an interview of Christof Koch, taken by George Zarkadakis on April 2004, in Tucson, AZ) GZ: How would you define the problem...
Are we zombies?
What is the difference between thinking and appearing to be thinking? How can one tell them apart? An interesting answer comes from philosophy of mind in the shape and form of zombies. A philosophical zombie (or “p-zombie”) is a hypothetical being indistinguishable from a human but without conscious experience, or “qualia”. When pinched, a p-zombie...